SPCA
When I first know this project, I started thinking
about which “customer” I was going to research. Then I picked SPCA, an animal shelter
several blocks away from school. Actually I intended to be a SPCA volunteer
since I knew that place. But I sank into school homework and everything looked
like a mess at first. I'd commit to doing it later, and not surprisingly, later
never came.
When Moccasins Project came, SPCA suddenly
came to my mind. Why don’t we research that place? Then summer and I registered
the volunteers there and got a rough plan about our research process. After
several classes, I fall in love with that place. The people there are all
animal lovers, so as me. We had so many common things to talk about and they
are extremely friendly, which dispel my nervous as a foreigner in a large
degree.
During our research, summer and I had
conversation everyday to exchange information and experience. One day, she told
me something I never noticed before. She found I was much easier to communicate
with other volunteers. She always got “No” or awkward silence, which didn’t
happen on me. It was likely because my passion about dogs and volunteer work.
When I talked with volunteers, I added a lot my personal opinions and emotion.
Sometimes, I even said “I don’t think so” or “I disagree”, which were not
appeared and didn’t suppose to be appeared in a formal design research
interview. On the contrary, this kind of conversation made people believe I was
really into our talk, which encouraged them to say more. Later, we decided to
use it as our advantage. Every time, we did our interview together. I was the
one who did the main talk, and summer guaranteed us in the right track.
After the data collection process, we took
three days and nights to analyze them and got our final insights and solutions
(thanks to Rockstar and Red Bull). I have to admitted, before we took so much
time on the analysis, this part seemed like “changing ways to say same
sentence”. But now, I realize that it actually is a scientific process to help
designers make a guess. The insights are all predictions which can’t be proved
100% right. What we do is using a scientific way to approach the most possible
guess. When I did the project step by step, I can feel the differences from
what I did before – get insights from the deduction. I used to summarize the
data first, and got insights or “problems” from the guess of summary, which was
one-sided and inaccurate. But the process I practiced in Moccasins was required
to base on data or closely guess, so the results we got is strongly logical and
reasonable.
strongly logical example
I think I
put my full mind into this project, and learned a lot on both interview skills
and date analysis. The most unsatisfied part of the Moccasins Project
I think is my presentation. After three days stay-up, even Red Bull is useless.
I didn't prepare well and my brain was totally out of work. The finally presentation
was supposed to be the last and most important step to show our results. Next
time, this part is the one I need to work on most.
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